Our brain on gratitude
Neuroscientist Glenn Fox has dedicated his life to studying gratitude — how it improves our resilience, lowers stress, and boosts overall health. He’s an expert on the ability of gratitude to help us through tough times.
But on Thanksgiving in 2013, Fox was feeling anything but grateful. That’s because, just a few days before, he’d lost his mother to ovarian cancer.
The day after, going down to Starbucks for coffee and some pastries, “it was like the most intense experience ever. And I just thought, how am I even going to get through this? How am I even going to order?”
Fox was just months away from completing his Ph.D. on the neural bases of gratitude. He knew from his research how therapeutic gratitude can be — and how it could help him in his long journey recovering from grief. What he didn’t know was how to make that happen on a practical level.
“I thought, you know, I really need to put this into action,” he said. “I don’t want to be flattened by this forever. I don’t want this to define me.”
Jealous of the Angels – read this beautiful poem
Fox’s personal journey into the power of gratitude began after his mother’s diagnosis with stage 4 ovarian cancer. She was interested in his work, but also interested in how it could help her…
“Gratitude fits into a category of what we would call pro-social emotions, and these are emotions that orient us towards the welfare of others,” Simon-Thomas said. “It creates this kind of bond, this enduring sense of connection, with another person or another organism who we’re poised to cooperate with.”
That cooperation, Simon-Thomas said, has been key to our survival as a species.
Learn more about healing with gratitude:
